The Latest: Hungary PM likens border closure to Iron Curtain

LONDON (AP) — The Latest on Europe's response to massive influx
of asylum-seekers and migrants (all times local):

10:00 p.m.

Hungary's prime minister has likened his country's closure of its
borders to migrants last year to Hungary's decision to allow
people trapped behind the Iron Curtain to leave the country a
generation ago.

Hungary's decision in 1989 to open its frontier with Austria
allowed hundreds of East Germans to escape to the West against
the wishes of their Communist government.

Viktor Orban told the Bavarian state Parliament late Monday that
"in 1989 we acted for the freedom of Europe and now we're
protecting this freedom."

Orban added that Hungary had only done its "duty."

The closure of Hungary's borders in the summer of 2015 left tens
of thousands of migrants stranded on their way through the
Balkans until Germany allowed them to enter its territory.

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11:30 a.m.

Hungary's prime minister says his proposed constitutional
amendment against any future efforts by the European Union to
relocate refugees is about the rights of individual EU nations to
oppose an "empire directed by Brussels."

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, speaking Monday at the opening of
the parliamentary debate of the amendment, said each country has
the right to decide its own fate while others want to replace
democratic decision-making with "a faceless bureaucratic
directorate."

An Oct. 2 referendum was invalid because of low turnout, but 98
percent of participating voters supported the government's
opposition to mandatory quotas.

The far-right Jobbik party supports the amendment "because
multiculturalism does not work," while the Socialists, the
largest leftist opposition group, said they would boycott the
process.

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10:25 a.m.

Fourteen children who have been living in a border refugee camp
in northern France are due to arrive in Britain to be reunited
with their families.

They are the first of dozens of children from the Calais camp to
be resettled in the U.K. this week.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams says the children
will register at a government building in south London Monday
before being reunited with relatives at local churches.

Under pressure from charities, religious leaders and French
authorities, Britain has agreed to accept scores of children from
Calais.

Thousands of migrants fleeing war and hardship have reached the
English Channel port town in the hope of making it to Britain.

France says it will soon close the slum-like camp known as the
"jungle" where many live.